june 22 ego
The first time I read Ogden Nash's Reflections On Ice Breaking I thought it was funny. The second time too. The third time I read it, as part of some school thing, I started to think, well, okay sure, it's funny, and fun, but is it good? What really is there here?
In case you don't know, the poem goes like this:
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker
It's not a serious poem, but it's a great little moment.
When I started writing as a teenager, I had these big dumb visions of what my future might have in store. Would I write a book? Two? Three? Would I write a bestseller? Would I create a character and a series that other people would consume the way I consumed Robert Ludlum's original Bourne trilogy as a teenager?
And, like, that's great and all, but the reason I started writing in the first place —— the real reason, not the "oh I want to impress girls" reason —— was because I liked the idea of a writer like Ogden Nash becoming low key immortal due to a silly little seven-word poem and not some grand opus. (And yes, I know that Nash's entire career wasn't Reflections On Ice Breaking, but you know what I mean.)
I've been a professional writer since 2005. The first money I was ever paid, as a journalist, was to review a movie called Conspiracy of Silence. That capsule review earned me like, $10.25 CAD and I got the bank to photocopy the cheque (yes, it was a cheque) when I deposited it (you damn well better believe I went to the teller) so I could put it on my wall the way a bar or coffee shop puts the first dollar they ever earn on the wall. Ten bucks isn't much, but's it's something, and it was the first something, and firsts matter because everything happens after that. (Fun fact: I never put the cheque on the wall.)
Anyway, capsule reviews were fun, but soon I started to think of them as, like, the bunny hill or otherwise something for other people to cut their teeth on. I wanted an assignment. A feature. A cover story. Something to put my name on the map. That's where I fucked up.
One of the things that sobriety (six years in two weeks) has helped me with is motivation, and understanding motivation, and understanding that if your motivations are wrong from the jump, you're going to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and climbing ladders placed against the wrong walls.
In 2005 I was a young man, but I wasn't. Not really. I got the writing gig at 26 but turned 27 two months into it. And at 27, I knew some stuff and had done some things, but I was still a greenhorn who was unsure of his place in the world. And then I got this job that a lot of people wanted. And then, out of nowhere, people wanted to know who I was, and made a point of including me in things. I was such a broken person back then, and fittingly, I learned all the wrong things from my first bits of low key, highly localized notoriety.
Back then I wanted people to know who I was because I didn't know who I was. And because my personal emotional growth was stunted because of, uh, let's just say "bad stuff," I started my writing career as though the job was to please or impress people instead of developing my craft or writing perfect sentences.
From 2005–2009, I mainly worked as an arts critic and city writer. I focused on film, music, comedy, and theatre, and, later, branched into food, drink, and travel. I mainly wrote for a Montreal alt-weekly called Hour and its sister publication, the Ottawa Xpress. I made very little money. And to a degree those were some of the best years of my life. Sure I was falling apart and I was never more than one bad day from a total meltdown, but it was exciting and I felt alive. Or so I thought. In truth there were some good times, sure, and a lot of great memories, but there was also the fact that I built up an entire artificial world in which I was hot shit when I really wasn't. I was good and I had moments of very good (and a few moments of oh, this is what being in the zone is) but I also had more than a few moments of straight up mid. And, when enough time passed, it was easier for me to see that a lot of those years amounted to me getting off on people I later learned were nobodies treating me like I was a somebody even though to them I could have been anybody.
I can't say for sure I know what I am getting at in this post, but it felt right coming out of my fingertips, so I'm going to leave it as is and read it tomorrow to see if I can continue the thought. The only thing I'll add is that if you want to write for a living, if you have stories inside of you, if you think in screenplays, or in metaphors, or whatever else, please do me a favour and never, ever do the work to please or impress or ensorcell other people. Don't do the work to see your name in lights or on a dust jacket. Do the work because it is who and what you are. Because it brings you joy. Because it lets you enter the world in a way that you otherwise can't.
Do the work because the little artsy weirdo who lives inside of your soul longs to write a perfect joke even if no one is there to laugh.
It is the tale. Not he who tells it.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass pillow
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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